Linux Mint team plans to enable vertical panel support in Cinnamon Desktop

The Linux Mint team has revealed their decision to enable vertical panel on upcoming versions of Cinnamon desktop. The panel will be horizontal by default, but there will be easy option to switch between horizontal and vertical panels.

Cinnamon is a modern desktop environment which was initially started as a fork of GNOME shell. The main motive behind cinnamon desktop is to offer a modern, user friendly, and familiar desktop environment. Though this desktop environment is mainly developed by Linux Mint team, it is also available for other major GNU/Linux distributions.

The main challenge while enabling support for vertical panel would be the arrangement of different applets on panel, as the availability of width will be limited by width of panel and arranging applets in this limited space will be a challenge.

Credit : Segfault blog

The newly proposed change will enable users to drag panel to have any orientation, either horizontal or vertical and also, the panel edit mode can be used to move applets within and between multiple panels.

We have added the ability to have panels at the side of your screen in exactly the same way as you can currently have them at bottom and top. There are some enforced differences, because there is only room to have an icon in a vertical panel. Any text that normally displays along with the applet icon cannot be shown, as it just won’t fit. Just about everything else you are used to looks and behaves as it does in Cinnamon 3.0 now.

The ability to use more advanced features such as panel hiding, panels on multiple monitors, and mouse pointer barriers are all there. The right click panel menu and applet menus work as you are used to, as does tooltip help on hover and window preview when hovering over a window list item. We’ve tried to keep everything as similar to what you are used to as possible.

For more information, see the blog post published in Linux Mint development blog(segfault).